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Multiheaded comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012) - Less Wrong
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Interesting. Having suspected that something along these lines was out there, I did mention the possibility of readjustment. However,
1) sorry and non-vindictive as we might feel for this subset of childkillers, we'd still have to give them some significant punishment, in order not to weaken our overall deterrence factor.
2) This still would hardly push anyone (me included) from "indiscriminating extermination" to "ignore" in a binary choice scenario.
If the problem is that almost everyone who could kill their ten-month-old kid is psychotic (something I'd disagree with particularly in light of the above and in light of the fact that it currently means defying one of our society's strongest taboos, but leaving that aside for now)...
Then why, exactly, are we trying to deter killing your babies? It's not going to have any effect on the number of psychotic people out there.
I suspect that "babykilling is OK in and of itself, but it's a visible marker for psychosis and we want to justify taking action against psychotics and therefore we criminalize babykilling anyway" isn't a particularly stable thought in human minds, and pretty quickly decomposes into "babykilling is not OK," "psychosis is not OK," "babykillers are psychotic," a 25% chance of "psychotics kill babies," and two photons.
I know it's stupid to jump in here, but you don't mean psychotic or psychosis. You mean psychopathic (a.k.a. sociopathic). Please don't lump the mentally ill together with evil murderers. Actual psychotic people are hearing voices and miserable, not gleefully plotting to kill their own children. You're thinking of sociopaths. Psychotics don't kill babies any more than anyone else. It's sociopaths who should all be killed or otherwise removed from society.
Some of the traits listed on the wikipedia page for psychopathy are traits that I want and have modified myself towards:
Lots of sociopaths as the term is clinically defined live perfectly productive lives, often in high-stimulation, high-risk jobs that neurotypical people don't want to do like small aircraft piloting, serving in the special forces of their local military and so on. They don't learn well from bad experiences and they need a lot of stimulation to get a high, so those sorts of roles are ideal for them.
They don't need to be killed or removed from society, they need to be channelled into jobs where they can have fun and where their psychological resilience is an asset.
Huh, okay. Thanks.
(It's odd how the words "schizophrenic" and "psychotic" bring up such different connotations even though schizophrenia is the poster-child of psychosis. (Saying this as a schizotypal person with "ultra high risk" of schizophrenia.))
Aren't sociopaths mentally ill too?
Yes, but people with different types of illness vary in whether they are likely to kill other people, which is the question here. This metastudy found half of male criminals have antisocial personality disorder (including sociopaths and psychopaths) and less than 4% have psychotic disorders. In other words, criminals are unlikely to be people who have lost touch with reality and more likely to be people who just don't care about other people.
Interesting, I knew that the rate was very low for psychotic people, but not that it was so high for sociopathic ones. I still don't think all sociopaths should be killed.
If you say they are, it's in a totally different way. Taboo "mentally Ill".
I was being a bit pedantic. When she says "don't lump the mentally ill together with evil murderers" I think she means "don't lump [psychotic] people in with evil murderers", which I don't disagree with. However, not all sociopaths are evil murderers. I would even say it's wrong to lump these mentally ill sociopaths together with evil murderers.
In other words, AspiringKnitter,
Okay. I've never heard of any non-evil sociopaths before, but I'll accept that they exist if you tell me they do.
What I meant was indeed that psychotic people aren't any more evil on average than normal people. The point is irrelevant to the thread, but I make it wherever it needs to be made because conflating the two isn't just sloppy, it harms real people in real life.
I think many sociopaths become high-powered businesspeople.
The other thing that "harms people in real life" is saying stuff like "sociopaths should all be killed or otherwise removed from society". To say such things, you must override your moral beliefs, which is not a good habit to be in, and not a good image of yourself to cache.
This may be a nitpick, but it's not clear to me that "removing all sociopaths from society" will even be beneficial to the remaining society. It's entirely possible that our society requires a certain number of sociopaths in order to function.
I have no hard evidence one way or the other, but I'm pretty sure that, historically, plans that involved "remove all X from society" turned out very poorly, for any given X.
Good point, although actually, my moral beliefs are consequentialist, and therefore actually formulated as "prevent the greatest possible number of murders" rather than "kill the fewest possible people personally", so it's not actually accurate to say I have to override moral beliefs to advocate removing sociopaths from society. But I guess the best idea is to neutralize the threat they pose while still giving them a chance at redemption. You're right.
I thought most high-powered businesspeople were evil. XP
Or, high powered politicians or the upper echelons of any religion's leadership.
Yeah, my understanding is that they exist. Just wondering, how would you expect to hear about a non-evil sociopath?
Yeah, I'm totally on board with you there (though I'm not really fond of the word evil). I remember hearing that psychotic people are much more likely to hurt themselves than average, but not more likely to hurt others. And yeah, it's bad to consider them to be "evil" when they're not or to contribute to a societal model of them that does the same.
Are we talking about psychotic people here or sociopaths (psychopaths)? The two are vastly different. Or are you saying that neither psychotic people nor sociopaths are necessarily evil?
I am saying that neither are necessarily evil.
OK.
Where did the two photons come from?
The photons come from unjustified pattern-matching.
Oooh.
Exhibit A: me.